Marco Casagrande_TEXT

Monday, April 22, 2019

My first contact with
Taiwan was in year 2000, when Architect Chi Ti-nan was representing Taiwan in
the Venice Biennale. I found his flyer on the ground and got curious about him.
This year we had the 60 Minute Man boat with forest in the Arsenale harbour. We
started a dialog with Chi and he invited me to Taipei to the Urban Flashes
symposium, 2001. Before Taiwan I had been working in Japan for various
projects, but Taipei was really the first Asian city for me where pollution was
so much part of the cityscape. There was a layer of dust on top of benches and
the river looked like dead. I could not understand, why the same people who
used the city so cleverly and self-organized, could let the natural environment
to become in such a bad shape. It felt like the city did not care or purely
ignored where it is growing in and growing from. On the airplane back to
Finland I wrote a letter to the Taipei City Government stating that they will
die, with simple set of one-liners, why. I did not receive any letter back.

In 2002 professor Roan
Ching-yueh was participating in the Urban Flashes in Lintz, Austria together
with architect Hsieh Ying-chun. I had written a small manifesto called Real
Reality and I guess Roan was the only one really reading it. It was rather
eye-opening also to follow Hsieh’s presentation about his communicative action
after the 228 earthquake with aboriginal people. Actually Roan moderated the
talks, also mine. Soon after this I received a letter back from the Taipei City
Government, where they started to invite me back to Taipei in order to start
thinking on some outlines for urban ecological restoration, not to die I
suppose.

I got back to Taipei
due to Roan’s lobbying and ended up to work in Treasure Hill with Hsieh. We had
200 students and Hsieh’s teams of aboriginal workers. I was mostly impressed
about the students and professors volunteering from the Tamkang University
Department of Architecture. I got adopted by Missis Chen, the matriarch of
Treasure Hill and she opened up some doors to the Local Knowledge of Taipei. It
was fascinating. These doors seemed to be gateways to same organic knowledge as
towards Professor Svein Hatloy, Bergen School of Architecture had walked me in,
Open Form. Roan talked about Dao, Treasure Hill was an organic constructive
mess and Missis Chen was dealing with the original ground. Biourbanism in
Taipei seemed to be possible. These people were Open Form.

After returning to
Finland I received an e-mail from Professor Chen Cheng-chen asking me to become
a Visiting Professor in Tamkang University. For some reason I though this to be
a joke and I woke up only after the third e-mail, that this might actually be
real. In autumn 2004 I started in Tamkang, which was a blessing. I tried to
drive to Taiwan from Finland with a KTM Paris-Dakar enduro motorcycle, but got
stuck in the Chinese border on the Gobi desert and had to fly the rest of the
journey. Tamkang was fully supportive for the development of the ideas of Urban
Acupuncture and the Third Generation City and I also found the Ruins there,
ending up living in the T-Factory ruin in Sanjhih.

It was in this ruin
where I found the cocoon of the Phimenes Sp., made out of weak concrete. Same
time Hsieh was experimenting weak concrete in Nantou. Roan said, that I should
show the cocoon to Mr. Aaron Lee, head of the JUT developers and so I got
introduced to him. Inspired by this Insect Architecture we realized the Bug
Dome bamboo cocoon in Shenzhen Biennale with Roan and Hsieh. Aaron flew in with
his brother to check out the work and after this he commissioned me to start
working with him in Taipei. So begun the Ultra-Ruin, Cicada, Ruin Academy and
Feng-Shui Snowman. Paracity also started with Aaron on his suggestion to think
of the possibility of a fragment of the Third Generation City on a flooded
island in the Xindian River.

These work and talks
are not mainly between people. There is some more grounding force pushing
through them, sweating through us. Some may refer to it as Dao or Open Form or
even Local Knowledge, but I think that it is a bit more complex than what can
be really named. It is kind of a will or requirement from the one mind of
Nature, the same will that is resonating behind the singing of the birds. The
will that is resonating behind the single moves of all the leaves in the
jungle, resonating behind anything that is part of the life-providing system.
Missis Chen was resonating this. Taipei is resonating this. Tuning up with this
resonation is the key to the Third Generation City, to Biourbanism and to Open
Form. Otherwise we are just pollution. Design is a secondary thing, resonating
is the main thing. It is wrong to say, that as architects we are doing
temporary things for the time being. When our things are resonating with
nature, there is no time; architecture and the city becomes part of nature.
Otherwise we are just pollution.

“One day he came back
from the Zone and became amazingly rich, amazingly rich. The next week he
hanged himself.”

The modern city is
drifting away. Together with industry it has proclaimed independence from
nature; mechanical man is self-sufficient. No more local knowledge, no more
pattern language, but a closed form tightly wrapped in the fictional cloth of
the development, the source of all pollution, the exponential one-way drive to
self-destruction.

What are the trees
thinking, and the ants? Our roadside-picnic has accelerated the enlightenment
of colonialism into the final level, the big-bang, which we cannot even hear.
We, who so sensitive even to hear the resonating behind the singing of the
birds. We, savages and natives of the big mind, decide not to hear or feel, but
to be served numb by our own self-destruction, the development.

To develop into what?
It’s not the god’s own image, nor it is the nothingness. We say society and we
say country, we say god. And to serve these we say economy. Karl Marx was
horribly wrong stating that we must own the means of production. Production on
the cost of what? We need to scarify and vote, for what – the self-destruction
– the development? The wisest of us never develop, they resonate with the rest.
How many of us can really resonate; even with the trees?

So the space is the
answer, or aliens picking us up. Leaving all this trash behind, and flying away
with the angels. Of course the chosen ones. The chosen people. These guys are
bad. They are Hollywood, “entertaining” the human species. Entertaining from
what? We need to survive. First comes survival, then comes comfort, then comes
beauty. Architecture deals with all of this. Architects are not important, but
architecture is. We can survive in beauty along with this one mind.
Architecture is the art of reality; there is no other reality than nature. We all
resonate with this one mind, if we forget the forgetting – the development.

We have two specialties: destroying ourselves and destroying everything around us. What is
left is going into space. Anarchy? Taking control of ourselves instead of
production, exploitation. Controlling ourselves in order to be able to
resonate. Nation states must be able to go in order to let nature to step in as
our countries. Otherwise this is all nonsense. We don’t inhabit the land, we
grow from it. Just like the trees.

Marco
Casagrande considers himself an animist architect. Architecture shouldn’t
impose itself on nature. Physical presence is the key. “I like to build a fire
before I start constructing. Sleeping at the site also helps me to get
connected with it.”

Photo: Ville Malja

The
sensual entanglement of ruins and wooden structures, refurbishing an abandoned
building with provisions for trees and plants, an organic structure of willow
branches in between depressing residential towers: what stands out in the
provocative architecture of the Finish architect Marco Casagrande is an
ambivalent attitude towards design. His designs have a sophisticated quality,
yet he also seems to criticize design in his work.

“I am not comfortable with architecture that
has become design,” he explained. “To me that kind of architecture feels like
pollution. Architecture should be connected with reality. Design stands on its
own. It tries to replace reality and to be independent of it, solely expressing
the designer’s point of view. I cannot put my thumb on the precise reason, but
I feel that design is my enemy.”

How can you possibly escape “design” while making architecture?

“I always try to ruin my own design. Architecture, real architecture, is not about imposing an artificial order on reality. It is about digging it out like an archaeologist. Therefore I work on a project until it starts to become itself. Sometimes, while designing, a moment comes when I feel that it is 'there'. Often it has to do with the site. I work at different places. I am like a parachutist, I am dropped in somewhere and then I have to open myself up to the place, to break myself open, to exhaust myself, until I reach a state of feeling the site. It's essential to get that feeling and to keep it. What I should do or shouldn’t do then starts to reveal itself. This process is not at all easy. And it isn’t necessarily pleasant. It can even be painful, especially if I try to rush at it. But I know that my own project first has to die. Every good project has to die at least once, and then it gets the chance to become more than you ever could think of beforehand. Of course, it mustn't die completely. But it has to die in such a way that you lose control over it. Control is another enemy, besides design.”

Drawing: Marco Casagrande

Photo: Jussi Tiainen

Photo: Sami Rintala

Do you have particular
strategies for giving up control?

“I like to
build a fire before I start constructing anything. Besides, I need a fire
because I have to eat, dry my clothes and repel mosquitoes. Building a fire is
a powerful method for connecting with the site. It means that I have to find
out where to gather wood and I have to check the direction of the wind, before
I can decide on the right place to build a fire. It often turns out in a later
phase of the project that this place isa meaningful place in the building. Sleeping at the site also helps me
to feel the connection. It teaches me where insects are coming from and how the
wind changes during the night. It generates encounters, for instance with local
people who sneak through the site, a grandmother who takes one brick because
she needs it for something.”

Can
you apply that strategy equally well in the city?

“It definitely works in the city too. In the
Ruin Academy in Taipei, in an abandoned building, I took away all the windows.
But while sleeping there I found out that I had created an unpleasant acoustic
situation. The rooms echoed with noise from the traffic. So I had to grow
bamboo in the windows and make wooden structures to damp out the echoes.
Physical presence is the key. You can be present mentally, but you have to be
present physically as well. Site specific conditions materialize in your body;
you can only understand them through your body. Being together with others
physically, working and sweating together, is a significant tool for
communication because we all share a similar body. We share the same physical
sensations, independently of our culture.”

Treasure Hill, Taipei, Taiwan (2003). Photo: Stephen Wilde

Photo: Marco Casagrande

But in the end you are
constructing something, which means that you create a projection for the
future, beyond your presence in the here and now.

“I am not so sure any more what time means. I
used to think of time as being born, growing up and dying. But now I am growing
more aware of different time scales, unconnected to my own lifespan. The times
of other people, of volcanic rocks and granite, of the ants that crawl through
the site and the plants and trees that grow there, of the wind and the
typhoons, the time of the Earth and the Moon. Each phenomenon has its own time,
and I want to understand them all and let them meet ‒ for instance, to direct the wind so you are
touched by it while sleeping. Or to raise the floor so snakes can crawl under
it."

Chen House, Sanjhih, Taipei County, Taiwan (2008). Photos: AdDa Zei

Do you mean that you
try to orchestrate different times?

“I know something about atmospheric circulation
and the course of the sun. But essentially, I don’t know what I am going to do
in advance. I trust in accidents. I try to make a platform for accidents. I dig
myself in and something gets constructed out of the mess. Treasure Hill in
Taipei was an illegal settlement in a complex of abandoned bunkers. The local
government commissioned me to develop an ecological master plan for Taipei
Basin, while the same government was destroying Treasure Hill. I found Treasure
Hill more interesting. I started a farm where a previous farm was destroyed by
government officials. But I did it in the wrong way because my model of farming
was Finnish, which means you put seeds in the ground and plants will grow. An
old lady who used to own the farm passed by and criticized my work. She told me
that a typhoon would wipe away everything I had done. She instructed me on the
right way to do it. I had to dig ditches and plant the seeds in specific
places. Finally the farm began to look like a farm. At the same time the whole
settlement was watching me. Together with the grandma instructing me, it became
a piece of theatre for them. They realized that she had accepted what I was
doing, rebuilding her farm. They lost their fear of the government, showed up
with tools and began replanting their own farms. An accidental encounter set
off the whole process of rebuilding farms and eventually Treasure Hill.”

Architecture is usually concerned with solving problems. Modernity can be seen in this light too. Do you consider your work as a criticism of modernity?

“Modernity is the aesthetic representation of industrialism. But I try to think positively about industrialism, which is of very recent origin. Maybe it will learn to become part of nature some day. Maybe it will become an organic machine. To achieve that we must open ourselves up to site specific knowledge. I would not call it old knowledge, because knowledge is changing all the time. However, industrialism still assumes that it is independent of nature. Nature is often seen as something hostile, with its floods and typhoons. Through industrialism we create a machine that is completely functional and not related to nature, although it uses its resources. To me, nature is a specific mentality, a mind that thinks of just one thing: to maximize life in the given conditions. If you are not connected to nature, you produce pollution.”

Bug Dome, Shenzhen, China (2009). Photos: Nikita Wu

How do you see your
work in relation to modernity? Is it a proposal to build differently, or is it
a kind of meditation on our attitude towards nature? In other words, is it more
like a work of art?

“I consider myself an animist architect. First
of all I attempt to connect myself to the mind of a city. Because I can usually
communicate only with a limited number of people, I spread rumours through the
city. You cannot control rumours. They change all the time. They are like creatures.
You can only send them but not control them. Rumours are powerful. I think you
could design cities just by rumours. Often my work functions as the source of
rumours. People react to them easily. Sometimes I talk about urban acupuncture.
That is basically the same. I asked students of the Tamkang University in
Taipei to build Trojan horses in order to 'attack' the city. The hidden content
was of course not soldiers, but letters from citizens to the mayor expressing
their wishes, thoughts and complaints about the city. The rumours spread and we
collected thousands of letters. The media became interested. Finally the mayor
had no choice but to receive us and to read some of the letters aloud.”

You did some projects
with ruins. What do you find attractive about ruins?

“I find them hope-inspiring. There is a lot of
hope in ruins. A ruin is architecture that has become part of nature again.
Nature reads architecture easily. Mosses start to grow, then plants and trees.
To me that that is very beautiful. People usually try to seal their home
against the intrusion of nature. To keep nature out of the house, you have to
clean it and maintain it all the time. It's a form of control. But if you
abandon the house, nature will break in and the house will become part of a
life-providing system. I call this second generation architecture. What I am
interested in is third generation architecture, when you return and find that
the house has become part of nature. How can you live there?There is plenty of space left over, but
perhaps you have to accept that the interior has been penetrated by a tree and
plants are creeping out of the cracks. The house is no longer shielding you
from nature. It has become an intermediary between you and nature.”

You went to live in a
ruin. Can you explain how that worked out practically?

“When I was working at Tamkang University, I
told the Dean of the architectural department, professor Chen, that I didn’t
want to live in a house any more. I asked for a ruin instead. He found a
derelict rice packing factory for me next to a rice paddy. My wife Nikita
protested that we could not live there because rain came in through the roof.
So my first step was to build a roof above the bed, and the next was to provide
facilities for keeping ourselves clean. We could get water in buckets from the
nearby river. I fixed up a heater with a gas tank for hot water and cooking. We
went from one step to the next until finally we could move in.”

You didn’t design
anything?

“I don’t think you can really design architecture.
Of course, you can reach a certain level by drawing and making models. But that
does not get to the essence of architecture. I only understand what needs to be
done once I am occupied with building on the site and experiencing the space
growing around me. This teaches me, for example, to make a small adjustment so
that I can see the moon at night. If you base the construction of a building
only on drawings, you force it to comply with preconceptions. Then the
architecture becomes strangely crippled, growing out of nothing. Architecture
shouldn’t impose itself on nature. Architecture should be pliant, an undecided
form.”

There’s been a lot of focus recently on affordable and sustainable housing concepts in Europe. Some private companies propose spaces-within-spaces, while others believe massive government investment is required. Finnish architect Marco Casagrande of Casagrande Laboratory, on the other hand, chose to simply plop down his "safe-house for neo-archaic biourbanism" in a Helsinki square and let his ingenious design do the talking.

With a footprint measuring just 2.5 x 5 meters, "Tikku" (Finnish for "stick") is built to fit within a single parking space. But its stacked three-story structure creates enough square footage for three distinct rooms, each of which can be modified to suit the desires of its occupant(s). The model that sprang up in a matter of hours outside of the Ateneum art museum during Helsinki design week features a floor for sleeping, a workspace, and a "greenhouse" for relaxing and soaking up natural light.

Beyond the neat compartmentalization of its three floors, Tikku’s structural attributes are also impressive. Casagrande’s plan to have it sit in a parking space is no accident: built using cross-laminated timber, five times lighter than concrete. That allows each Tikku to exist as an almost foundationless structure, utilizing nothing more than a sand-box bottom and existing concrete in parking lots and other public spaces to stay upright. The cross-laminated timber is 20 centimeters thick, which means no extra insulation is required for occupants to comfortably withstand even harsh Scandinavian winters.

Given that Casagrande describes Tikku as "a needle of urban acupuncture, conquering the no-man’s land from the cars and tuning the city towards the organic," it’s unsurprising that he had sustainability in mind. Each unit will be equipped with solar panels, but amenities like running water will be absent, a necessary concession that will force occupants to rely on 'functions [that[ can be found in the surrounding city."

Tikku has the look of a viable, minimalist, and fast-fab housing concept. In Casagrande’s eyes, the fact that it will force us to reevaluate the relationship the conveniences of our contemporary urban lives and our planet’s resources is an added bonus. As he himself puts it, "Modern man has to die a bit in order to be reborn."

1. Ruins constitute syncretic maps of urban environments, as they show the citizens’ usage patterns, imagination of lack of it, traversals, and behaviors. In short, they constitute the map of the city as seen from the composition of the myriads of micro-histories of its dwellers, and in its perpetual evolution and transformation.

How important are these maps?

What is their meaning and how can they be used.

MC

These ruin maps are a pattern of urban acupuncture. They are small composts where the city is slowly fermenting. The surrounding city, at least the official city, may consider these composts as the smelly parts of the city and cannot really cope with them. The only solution which the official city seems to have is to erase them, turn the ruins into lawn or park, which was supposed to happen to Treasure Hill for example. The official city is in-sensitive for the energy and potential which these areas are suggesting. Normal people though are highly sensitive for urban energies and would be fully capable to operate the map of ruins. The ruins are insulting the official control, but on the other hand they have the capacity of offering the most fertile top-soil for organic urban development, which of course seeks to get rid of the centralized power structure.

These ruins are voids in the mechanical tissue of the centrally governed city. They are openings to different times, values, dreams and possibilities – like the attic of a house. It is very likely that the essence of the surrounding city would intensify within these voids and get mixed or at least in connection with other organic layers of the city, like in a black hole. Layers which are invisible for the official control. Ruins have the possibility of partly tuning the city towards the organic, towards the third generation city.

These ruins can be used in interpreting what the collective mind is transmitting. They can be sensitive platforms for local knowledge to emerge and evolve; as receivers. They can be hot-spots for new biourban knowledge building. One must be very careful with the relationship with the official city though. Once the political elements of the city will realize that something constructive, collectively touching and possibly media-sexy is cooking up in the formally smelly ruins, they will try to squeeze in and buy off the energy. In case the constructive energy of the ruins is sold, the construction will turn into destruction. The official city can only banalize the local knowledge.

2. What you say that the Third Generation City is the ruin of the industrial city, you point into a really interesting direction, indicating how the emergent, spontaneous, energetic dynamics of the city and of its inhabitants are useful in gaining better understandings about the city, and about the ways in which it is interesting to create interventions in its fabric. Maybe even more useful than the information which is obtained through administrative, bureaucratic and commercial processes.

This also places citizens in a new light, suggesting ways in which their active participation becomes of fundamental importance to understand the city, and to act in it.

How do you imagine citizenship?

How do you imagine institutions?

MC

Every citizen is part of the big brain of the city. This collective conscious is complex, multi-layered and organic, but it is still a sensitive nervous system. The official city wants to flatten these layers into a simple two-dimensional map of the city, which is the official reality. Citizens however move much more flexibly, freely and multi-dimensionally in the city that what the official map would allow. The official city is just a background for the real citizen activities. Un-official information is powerful. Whole cities could be designed by rumors. Urban power structures want to flatten the multi-dimensional, resourceful and somehow mystical real citizen. He is too much in connection with nature, and the industrial city wants to claim independence from nature. Nature is seen as something hostile, something that wants to break the machine and the untamed natural citizen is an unpredictable agent of nature, an urban native that needs to get civilized, needs to be saved from himself.

Institutions should be the inner organs of the city to keep life pumping through it. They could also be partly the nervous nods, which are dealing with the information and other energy flows of the city, thinking of the collective mind. City is one brain. Also nature is only one brain. City should be part of the natural one brain and the institutions should take care of that. Now the institutions are human-focused in a controlling sense and separating the city form nature. The solution which the developed institutional city is offering to the citizens is mechanical and standardized life. City should be a biological man-made organism and part of nature, otherwise it is against nature, a mental disorder – a human error as one might say. Institutions should be organic and most likely modular. They should treat the urban organism through punctual interventions, which would then be connected with the nervous network of the urban brain. This cannot be based on control and hardness – those are death’s companions. City is not an institution, it is a living organism. Accident is greater than human control.

3. Relation, conversation and flows. Your vision of the city is very focused on these themes. Even in unexpected ways, for example using the term of “urban rumors”. This is very interesting, as it does not imply a concept of beauty and value which is not centered on form, but, rather, on the presence of energy, dynamics, fluidness and emergence, and also on the harmonies and dissonances, the conflicts and consensus which are typical of living ecosystems.

How can an urban planner, a public administrator, an architect, a designer or a citizen learn to recognize this new aesthetic and this value, and use them for collaboration, participation, action and performance in the city, with other people, institutions and organizations?

How does this fit in with your connection of Urban Acupuncture?

MC

A rather good example of this was the co-operation between the Ruin Academy, JUT Developers and the Taipei City Government. First of all the Ruin Academy was set up as an open platform for different universities, disciplines and professionals to participate in multi-disciplinary research & design workshops, courses and actions. The topics for these assignments would be developed together with the City Government and in the end we would also report to the City Government. Still again, this was all un-official. The City Government would not officially commission us and we would not be tied to any official nor academic bureaucracy. We would have access to the official data and intelligence, but we could operate much lighter and direct; more like the Special Forces. Our operations were financed and backed up by the JUT Developers and the participating universities, who would also benefit of our findings and developments.

All the participating universities, the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, National Taiwan University departments of Sociology and Anthropology and Aalto University SGT Sustainable Global Technologies research center, found it very fruitful to have an open academic operational platform, which did not belong to any university, but was more based on academic squatting. Our interface to the surrounding city was also more real than with the locked academic disciplines and the interaction with local knowledge proved to be vital to the new knowledge building of the Third Generation City.

City governments are full of departments and disciplines and every corner has a king. These kings don’t talk to each other, but still again they are the first ones to admit, that the highly regulated and protected administrative hierarchies are not optimal for mostly cross-disciplinary and multi-layered challenges and possibilities of the urban reality. They used the Ruin Academy to say things that they cannot say and to study things that they cannot study. We could have meetings in the evenings with the city officials, who could pass us the questions, interests or notions on which they wanted the Ruin Academy to react – almost as if they would be operating with a clandestine organization. We would be their interface to the un-official and to the underground, to the normal.

In some cases, like with Treasure Hill, the City Government was using me as kind of a joker, wild card. In Treasure Hill the Park Department of the City Government was already destroying the un-official settlement, when the Cultural Department of the same City Government was commissioning me to save Treasure Hill. In the end they were all evaluating, how did I succeed and decided to come smiling with the results. “This is exactly what we were commissioning you to do.” If I had failed, they would have just blamed the stupid foreigner and bulldozed down the place.

What I am trying to say is that we need to develop more un-conventional ways to deal with the urban problematics. We already have the city governments, administrations, organization, NGOs and universities, which are taking care of the official routines, but we need more flexible, straight-forward and light operators to work avant-garde and behind the lines, also underground. Operators who can make hearts-and-minds connections with the local knowledge and mobilize people to develop their city. Operators who can communicate with the shared mind, the collective urban conscious.

Urban Acupuncture is both a strategy for urban development through punctual interventions and straight-forward tactics. There are many holes and cracks in a city and these cracks can be used for cooking up the operations. In the end, the city of cracks is much more interesting and humane than the two-dimensional, flat, industrial-modern city. Urban Acupuncture is breaking the industrial control, but it is for good – it is constructive anarchy.

4. What transformation comes into this scenario when many people in cities have integrated digital means in expressing their micro histories, relations, emotions, behaviors, in conscious of unconscious ways?MC

Commercial intelligence has been using the methodology of Urban Acupuncture for a long time. A good example is the network of 7-Eleven convenient stores in Taipei. They are located in carefully studied commercial acupuncture points around the city, building up the densest network of 7-Elevens anywhere in the world. Our actions, behaviors, wishes, desires and individual histories are constantly monitored, traced and processed based on our digital activities. Our digital networks have the power of launching rumors and revolutions, but they are also very easily manipulated. An interesting question is, what is the interface and dialog between this digital mind and nature? Can it support the organic knowledge as a portal for the collective mind to communicate? Are we now just looking at the simplified and flat prints of the digitally moving information the same way as the official city is flattening the informational space of the city into a two dimensional map? Would it be needed to penetrate through the thin layer of visual information surface to the actual digital space, where the countless informational layers are generating new streams of knowledge and how can we communicate with this digital subconscious? I think that this subconscious wants to surface on the city. It wants to take both form and be sensed through our physical presence and our natural mind.

5. In your conception, the Third Generation City is itself a form of knowledge. This is yet another parallel with the concepts expressed in Digital Urban Acupuncture, where the Relational Ecosystem of the city, captured through data, information and knowledge exchanges, becomes a commons, available and accessible for everyone to use.

How, in your opinion, should this knowledge be accessible and usable?

And, on top of that: how is it possible to suggest and create the basis for the emergence of the imagination, sensibility and desire to use this knowledge?

MC

This knowledge is already now a source of intelligence for political and economic power speculations. It is also a form of new culture. Physically, millions of people are now migrating based on this data – migrants, refugees and people moving to cities. Big digitally formed and manipulated tribes and armies are in physical war and one of the main frontlines is digital.

The digital realm is one surface of individual and mass communication, but is it yet a form of new knowledge? The digital underground movements and paths seem somewhat hopeful, but the big data is just entertainment and commercially controlled – not very different from the official city. One should not be blindfolded by the online access to information and entertainment. Flesh is More.

6. How important (or not) is education in your vision of the city?

How can the literacy and sensibility which are needed to conceive the possibility of accessing the knowledge in the Third Generation City emerge in citizens?

Through a school? An educational process? Peer-to-peer processes?

The availability and accessibility of tools and methods?

How?

MC

The un-official community gardens and urban farms of Taipei are run by anarchist grandmothers. Also the urban farming communities are often matriarchal – like Treasure Hill. The ex-Soviet collective farms are by now run by babushkas. Modern city is a patriarchal structure as a form of industrialism. In Taipei the kids go to help on the collective farms – carry water, dig soil etc. Sometimes they come to the farms after school to do their home-work. They learn how to farm and the local knowledge becomes real for them. One step away is the official city. Modern man should take the liberty to travel a thousand years back in order to realize, that the things are the same. What is real cannot be speculated. What is real is valuable. There is no other reality than nature.

Maybe the digital realm is also nature. Possibly it is like the resonating behind the singing of the birds. We can either listen to the birds’ singing or we can feel and contemplate with the resonating behind it. Maybe we are resonating with the digital flows as well. We can feel the mind, but cannot really interpret it. Nature is a life providing system. My friend is a digital monk and he is very much tuned with nature as well.

Third generation citizens don’t need to be educated. They already exist. They are the ones connected with local knowledge and sensitive enough to feel the different pulses and messages of the city. They are the connection between the city and nature. We all have that quality, but we are educated to forget it. The third generation condition requires us to forget the forgetting.

Instead of education we need to learn, how to pay attention to the seeds of the Third Generation City. We need to document them, learn from them and let them grow. Most of all we have to stop ignoring them. These seeds are often cooking at the un-official layers of the city. City is a big compost, which needs to be turned around every now and then in order to keep it alive. The seeds of the 3G City are in connection with the local knowledge and they form a pattern of organic urban acupuncture to the static city trying to tune the urban development into biourbanism. The challenge is, that these seeds don’t necessarily support the economic speculations and can be quite contra dictionary to the established power hierarchies, which try to suffocate them. Hence the existence in underground. The digital realm may be a possibility for the local knowledge, for the seeds of the Third Generation City to communicate and connect with the larger mind of individual citizens.

How? Forget the forgetting. Industrialism is young and simple. Let the organic growth make a new layer on top of the industrial city. This coexistence will develop into the next step of urban industrialism, the city can learn to become an organic machine. In a sense we must ruin the mechanical city and open up the industrial control, so that nature can step in. Nature including human nature.

Wednesday, September 28, 2016

Casagrande,
M. (2016). From Urban Acupuncture to the Third Generation City. Journal of

Biourbanism,
IV(1&2/2015), 29−42.

From Urban Acupuncture to

the Third Generation City

Marco Casagrande

Ruin
Academy, C-Lab, and International Society of Biourbanism, Finland

ABSTRACT

The
crisis of urbanism is analyzed as a vital phenomenon that prepares the Third
Generation City—its connection with nature and its flesh. The industrial city
is, on the contrary, fictitious. The example of the settlement of Treasure
Hill, near Taipei, is given. As an organic ruin of the industrial city,
Treasure Hill is a biourban site of resistance and an acupuncture point of
Taipei, with its own design methodology based on Local Knowledge. This ruin is
the matter from which parasite urbanism composts the modern city. Another
example is offered by observing the daily life in Mumbai’s unofficial
settlements. Urban acupuncture, the Third Generation City, and the conceptual
model of paracity speak to the community that rests in the hands of its own
people.

Missis
Chen is 84 years old. She has lived together with the Xindian River all her
life. Her family used to have a boat, like every Taipei family, and a water
buffalo. Sometimes the kids would cross the river on the back of the buffalo.
Sometimes an uncle might end up so drunk, that they hesitated, if they could
put him back on his boat after an evening together. Children, vegetables, and
laundry were washed in the river. The water was drinkable and the river was
full of fish, crabs, snails, clams, shrimp, and frogs to eat.

Missis
Chen used to work for sand harvesters, who dug sand out of the river bottom for
making concrete. She made food for them. Many of the sand harvesters lived in
the Treasure Hill settlement together with Missis Chen’s family. In the past,
the hill had been a Japanese Army anti-aircraft position, and it was rumored
that the Japanese had hidden a treasure of gold somewhere in their bunker
networks inside the hill—hence the name Treasure Hill.

Xindian
River was flooding—like all Taipei rivers—when the frequent typhoons arrived in
summers and autumns. The flood was not very high, though—the Taipei Basin is a
vast flood plain and water has plenty of space to spread out. Houses were
designed so that the knee-high flood would not come in, or in some places, the
water was let into the ground floor while people continued to live on the upper
floors. In Treasure Hill, the flood would also come into the piggeries and
other light-weight structures on the river flood bank, but the houses with
people were a bit higher up on the hill. All of the flood bank was farmed, and
the farms and vegetable gardens were constructed so that they could live
together with the flood. Flooding was normal. This pulse of nature was a source
of life.

Missis
Chen remembers when the river got polluted. “The pollution comes from
upstream,” she says, referring to the many illegal ‘Made in Taiwan’—factories
up on the mountains and river banks, which let all their industrial waste into
the river. “Now not even the dogs eat the fish anymore.” At some point, the
river became so polluted that Taipei children were taught not to touch the
water or they would go blind. The flood became poisonous for the emerging
industrial city, which could no longer live together with the river nature. The
city built a wall against the flooding river:
a 12 meters high, reinforced concrete flood wall separating the built
urban environment from nature.

“One
day, the flood came to Chiang Kai-shek’s home and the Dictator got angry. He
built the wall. We call it the Dictator’s Wall,” an elderly Jiantai fisherman
recalls sitting in his bright blue boat with a painted white eye and red mouth
and continues to tell his stories describing which fish disappeared which year,
and when some of the migrating fishes ceased to return to the river. In one
lifetime, the river has transformed from a treasure chest of seafood into an
industrial sewer, which is once again being slowly restored towards a more
natural condition. The wall hasn’t moved anywhere. The generations of Taipei
citizens born after the 1960s don’t live in a river city. They live in an
industrially-walled urban fiction separated from nature.

TREASURE HILL

In
2003, the Taipei City Government decided to destroy the unofficial settlement
of Treasure Hill. By that time, the community consisted of some 400 households
of mainly elderly Kuomintang veterans and illegal migrant workers. The
bulldozers had knocked down the first two layers of the houses of the terraced
settlement on the hillside. After that, the houses were standing too high for
the bulldozers to reach, and there were no drivable roads leading into the
organically built settlement. Then the official city destroyed the farms and
community gardens of Treasure Hill down by the Xindian River flood banks. Then
they cut the circulation between the individual houses—small bridges, steps,
stairs, and pathways. After that, Treasure Hill was left to rot, to die slowly,
cut away from its life sources.

Roan
Chin-Yueh of the WEAK! managed so that the City Government Department of
Cultural Affairs invited me to Taipei. She introduced me to Treasure Hill’s
impressive organic settlement with a self-made root-cleaning system of gray
waters through patches of jungle on the hillside. Treasure Hill was composting
organic waste into fertilizer for the farms and using minimum amounts of
electricity, which was stolen from the official grid. There was even a central
radio system through which Missis Chen could transmit important messages to the
community, such as inviting them to watch old black and white movies in the
open-air cinema in front of her house.

At
that point, the city had stopped to collect trash from Treasure Hill, and there
were lots of garbage bags in the alleys. I started to collect these garbage
bags and carried them down the hill into a pile close to a point that you could
reach with a truck. The residents did not speak to me, but instead they hid
inside their houses. One could feel their eyes on one’s back, though. Some
houses were abandoned and I entered them. The interiors and the atmospheres
were as if the owners had left all of a sudden. Even photo albums were there
and tiny altars with small gods with long beards. In one of the houses, I could
not help looking at the photo album. The small tinted black and white photos
started in mainland China, and all the guys wore Kuomintang military uniforms.
Different landscapes in different parts of China, and then at some point the
photos turned to color prints. The same guys were in Taiwan. Then there was a
woman, and an elderly gentleman posed with her in civil clothes by a fountain.
Photos of children and young people. Civil clothes, but the Kuomintang flag of
Taiwan everywhere. A similar flag was inside the room. Behind me, somebody
enters the house, which is only one room with the altar on the other end and a
bed on the other. The old man is looking at me. He is calm and observant,
somehow sad. He speaks and shows with his hand at the altar. Do not touch—I
understand. I look at the old man in the eyes and he looks into mine. I feel
like looking at the photo album. The owner of the house must have been his
friend. They have travelled together a long way from the civil war of China to
Taiwan. They have literally built their houses on top of Japanese concrete
bunkers and made their life in Treasure Hill. His friend has passed away. There
is a suitcase and I pack inside the absent owner’s trousers and his shirt, both
in khaki color. I continue collecting the garbage bags and carry the old man’s
bag around the village. The next day the residents start helping me with collecting
the garbage. Professor Kang Min-Jay organizes a truck to take the bags away.
After a couple of days, we organize a public ceremony together with some
volunteer students and Treasure Hill veterans, and declare a war on the
official city: Treasure Hill will fight
back and it is here to stay. I’m
wearing the dead man’s clothes.

We
have a long talk with Professor Roan about Treasure Hill and how to stop the
destruction. He suggests that Hsieh Ying-Chun (Atelier 3, WEAK!) will join us
with his aboriginal Thao tribe crew of self-learned construction workers. I
start touring at local universities giving speeches about the situation and try
to recruit students for construction work. In the end, we have 200 students
from Tamkang University Department of Architecture, Chinese Cultural
University, and National Taiwan University. A team of attractive girl students
manage to make a deal with the neighboring bridge construction site workers,
and they start offloading some of the construction material cargo to us from
the trucks passing us by. We mainly get timber and bamboo; they use mahogany
for the concrete molds.

With
the manpower and simple construction material, we start reconstructing the
connections between the houses of the settlement, but most importantly, we also
restart the farms. The bridge construction workers even help us with a digging
machine. Missis Chen comes to advise us about the farming and offers us food
and Chinese medicine. I am invited to her house every evening after the workday
with an interpreter. She tells her life story and I see how she is sending food
to many houses whose inhabitants are very old. Children from somewhere come to
share our dinners as well. Her house is the heart of the community. Treasure
Hill veterans join us in the farming and construction work. Rumors start
spreading in Taipei: things are cooking
in Treasure Hill. More people volunteer for the work, and after enough urban
rumors the media arrives suddenly. After the media, the politicians follow.
Commissioner Liao from the City Government Cultural Bureau comes to recite
poems. Later Mayor Ma Ying-Jeou comes jogging by with TV crews and gives us his
blessings. The City Government officially agrees that this is exactly why they
had invited me from Finland to work with the issue of Treasure Hill. The same
government had been bulldozing the settlement away 3 weeks earlier.

One
can design whole cities simply with rumors.

Working
in Treasure Hill had pressed an acupuncture point of the industrial Taipei
City. Our humble construction work was the needle that had penetrated through
the thin layer of official control and touched the original ground ofTaipei—collective topsoil where Local
Knowledge is rooting. Treasure Hill is an urban compost, which was considered a
smelly corner of the city, but after some turning is now providing the most
fertile topsoil for future development. The Taiwanese would refer to this
organic energy as “Chi.”

URBAN ACUPUNCTURE

After
the initial discovery in Treasure Hill, the research of Urban Acupuncture
continued at the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, where Chairman
Chen Cheng-Chen under my professorship added it to the curriculum in the autumn
of 2004. In 2009, the Finnish Aalto University’s Sustainable Global
Technologies research center with Professor Olli Varis joined in to further
develop the multidisciplinary working methods of Urban Acupuncture in Taipei,
with focus on urban ecological restoration through punctual interventions. In
2010, the Ruin Academy was launched in Taipei with the help of the JUT
Foundation. The Academy operated as an independent multidisciplinary research
center moving freely in between the different disciplines of art and science
within the general framework of built human environment. The focus was on Urban
Acupuncture and the theory of the Third Generation City. Ruin Academy
collaborated with the Tamkang University Department of Architecture, the
National Taiwan University Department of Sociology, Aalto University SGT, the
Taipei City Government Department of Urban Development, and the International
Society of Biourbanism.

Urban
Acupuncture is a biourban theory, which combines sociology and urban design
with the traditional Chinese medical theory of acupuncture. As a design
methodology, it is focused on tactical, small-scale interventions on the urban
fabric, aiming in ripple effects and transformation on the larger urban
organism. Through the acupuncture points, Urban Acupuncture seeks to be in
contact with the site-specific Local Knowledge. By its nature, Urban
Acupuncture is pliant, organic, and relieves stress and industrial tension in
the urban environment, thus directing the city towards the organic—urban nature
as part of nature. Urban Acupuncture produces small-scale, but ecologically and
socially catalytic development on the built human environment.

Urban
Acupuncture is not an academic innovation. It refers to common collective Local
Knowledge practices that already exist in Taipei and other cities,
self-organized practices that are tuning the industrial city towards the
organic machine—the Third Generation City.

In
Taipei, the citizens ruin the centrally governed, official mechanical city with
unofficial networks of urban farms and community gardens. They occupy streets
for night markets and second hand markets, and activate idle urban spaces for
karaoke, gambling, and collective exercises (dancing, Tai-Chi, Chi-Gong, et
cetera). They build illegal extensions to apartment buildings, and dominate the
urban no man’s land by self-organized, unofficial settlements, such as Treasure
Hill. The official city is the source of pollution, while the self-organized
activities are more humble in terms of material energy-flows and more tied with
nature through the traditions of Local Knowledge. There is a natural resistance
towards the official city. It is viewed as an abstract entity that seems to
threaten people’s sense of community, and separates them from the biological
circulations.

Urban
Acupuncture is Local Knowledge in Taipei, which on a larger scale, keeps the
official city alive. The unofficial is the biological tissue of the mechanical
city. Urban Acupuncture is a biourban healing and development process
connecting modern man with nature.

THIRD
GENERATION CITY

The
first generation city is the one where the human settlements are in straight
connection with nature and dependent on nature. The fertile and rich Taipei
Basin provided a fruitful environment for such a settlement. The rivers were
full of fish and good for transportation, with the mountains protecting the
farmed plains from the straightest hits of the frequent typhoons.

The
second generation city is the industrial city. Industrialism granted the
citizens independence from nature—a mechanical environment could provide
everything humans needed. Nature was seen as something unnecessary or as
something hostile—it was walled away from the mechanical reality.

The
Third Generation City is the organic ruin of the industrial city, an open form,
organic machine tied with Local Knowledge and self-organized community actions.
The community gardens of Taipei are fragments of third generation urbanism when
they exist together with their industrial surroundings. Local Knowledge is
present in the city, and this is where Urban Acupuncture is rooting. Among the
anarchist gardeners are the Local Knowledge professors of Taipei.

The
Third Generation City is a city of cracks. The thin mechanical surface of the
industrial city is shattered, and from these cracks emerge the new biourban
growth, which will ruin the second generation city. Human-industrial control is
opened up in order for nature to step in. A ruin is when the manmade has become
part of nature. In the Third Generation City, we aim at designing ruins. The
Third Generation City is true when the city recognizes its local knowledge and
allows itself to be part of nature.

“To find a
form that accommodates the mess, that is the task of the artist now” (Samuel
Beckett).

PARASITE
URBANISM

The
emerging biourban cities are not homogeneous platforms for single cultures,
races, economical doctrines, timelines, or other ways of life or being. They
are urban composts where organic knowledge is floating into the cracks of the
industrially developed surroundings. This organic knowledge has the ability to treat
and heal the surrounding city as a positive parasite. It can suck in and treat
urban and even industrial waste, and it is able to build bridges between the
modern man and nature. It can grow to places where the industrial city cannot
go and through punctual interventions, it can tune the whole urban development
towards the organic; built human nature as part of nature.

This
symbiotic coexistence between the “official” and “developed” city, and the
unofficial, self-built and organic parasite biourbanism has been existing
already for a long time with slums, favelas, camps of migrating workers,
unofficial settlements, urban enclaves of resistance, community gardens and
urban farms, and even refugee camps. These strongholds of urban nomads are
harvesting the surrounding city from what it calls waste, surplus material
streams of the industrial life. Without these urban nomads, these material
streams will end up in nature as what we call pollution. The unofficial is the
buffer zone between development and nature—trying to save the city from itself.

This
parasite urbanism should be encouraged to grow on the expense of industrial
efficiency. It should eat the urban industrialism away up until a point, where
the city is in tune with the life-providing systems of nature. Within this new
biourban human mangrove, the relicts of the industrial hardness will emerge as
islands, ridges or hills, maybe volcanoes. This urban compost is the Third
Generation City. It already exists in many places and on many scales, from
Jakarta to Rio, and from the collective urban farms of Taipei to the buffalo
sheds of Mumbai. It is not a utopia, but a way in which the different material
cycles of cities have coexisted for much longer than industrialism.

For
example, in Mumbai there have always been countless buffalo sheds along the
monsoon floodwater streams. The respected animal gives fuel (dung-cakes) and
milk to the surrounding city. Here, the river or stream is an essential part of
this symbiosis. The buffalo dung is pushed to the low water stream, where women
mix it by foot with straw before it gets transported back to the sheds for the
making and drying of the dung-cakes. The buffaloes also need to get washed
every day. The buffalo caretakers are living on decks above the animals.

People
have always brought their household waste from the surrounding city to the
buffalo sheds in exchange for the milk and energy. The first one to eat from
this organic waste is the buffalo, which will pick up the best parts. Then
comes the goat, which can even eat paper. After the goat comes the dog, who
goes through the possible small remnants of bones, skins, and meat. The last
one in the chain is the pig, who will eat even rotten meat and already digested
material. The surrounding city cannot live without the buffalo sheds. This
chain of animals worked perfectly before the age of industrial materials. Then,
materials started to appear in the trash bags that even a pig could not
consume—plastics, aluminum, et cetera. The city needed a new animal: man.

The
slums of Mumbai have grown around the buffalo sheds. Millions of people have
been transported from the poorest areas of India to take care of the developed
city. Only in the Owhiwara River chain of slums is there estimated to live some
700,000 inhabitants. The recycling stations and illegal factories are situated
here, just next door to Bollywood. What cannot be recycled or treated ends up
in the river, just like in Jakarta it ends up in the bay. Monsoon will flush
the toilet.

The
buffalo sheds are the original acupuncture needles of Mumbai. Now, together
with slums, they present a strong culture of parasite urbanism. The harvesting,
processing, and recycling of the urban waste is harmful for the people who do
it and for nature. The Third Generation City is looking towards a situation where
the parasite urbanism has reached another level presenting a biourban balance
between the rivers, slums, and the surrounding city.

PARACITY

Learning
from the cases of Taipei and Mumbai, we have developed a conceptual model to
further study the possibilities of parasite urbanism: Paracity (2014).

Paracity
is a biourban organism that is growing on the principles of Open Form: individual design-built actions generating
spontaneous communicative reactions on the surrounding built human environment.
This organic constructivist dialogue leads to self-organized community
structures, sustainable development, and knowledge building. Open Form is close
to the original Taiwanese ways of developing the self-organized and often
“illegal” communities. These micro-urban settlements contain a high volume of
Local Knowledge, which we believe will start composting in Paracity, once the
development of the community is in the hands of the citizens.

The
agritectural organism of the Paracity is based on a primary wooden
three-dimensional structure, an organic grid with spatial modules of 6 x 6 x 6
meters, constructed out of CLT (cross-laminated timber) beams, and columns.
This simple structure can be modified and developed by the community members.
The primary structure can grow even in neglected urban areas such as flood
plains, hillsides, abandoned industrial areas, storm water channels, and slums.
Paracity is perfectly suited for flooding and tsunami risk areas and the CLT
primary structure is highly fire-resistant and capable of withstanding
earthquakes.

Paracity
provides the skeleton, but the citizens create the flesh. Design should not
replace reality—Flesh is More. Paracitizens will attach their individual,
self-made architectural solutions, gardens, and farms on the primary structure,
which will offer a three- dimensional building grid for DIY architecture. The
primary structure also provides the main arteries of water and human
circulation, but the finer Local Knowledge nervous networks are weaved in by
the inhabitants. Large parts of Paracity is occupied by wild and cultivated
nature following the example of Treasure Hill and other unofficial communities in
Taipei.

Paracity’s
self-sustainable biourban growth is backed up by off-the-grid modular
environmental technology solutions, providing methods for water purification,
energy production, organic waste treatment, waste water purification, and
sludge recycling. These modular plug-in components can be adjusted according to
the growth of the Paracity, and moreover, the whole Paracity is designed not
only to treat and circulate its own material streams, but to start leeching
waste from its host city and thus becoming a positive urban parasite following
the similar kinds of symbiosis as in-between slums and the surrounding city. In
a sense, Paracity is a high-tech slum, which can start tuning the industrial
city towards an ecologically more sustainable direction. Paracity is a Third
Generation City, an organic machine urban compost, which assists the industrial
city to transform itself into being part of nature.

The
pilot project of the Paracity grows on an urban farming island of Danshui
River, Taipei City. The island is located between the Zhongxing and Zhonxiao
bridges and is around 1,000 meters long and 300 meters wide. Paracity Taipei
celebrates the original first generation Taipei urbanism with a high level of
“illegal” architecture, self-organized communities, urban farms, community
gardens, urban nomads, and constructive anarchy.

After
the Paracity has reached critical mass, the life-providing system of the CLT
structure will start escalating. It will cross the river and start taking root
on the flood plains. It will then cross the 12 meters high Taipei flood wall
and gradually grow into the city. The flood wall will remain in the guts of the
Paracity, but the new structure enables Taipei citizens to fluently reach the
river. Paracity will reunite the river reality and the industrial urban
fiction. Paracity is a mediator between the modern city and nature. Seeds of
the Paracity will start taking root within the urban acupuncture points of
Taipei: illegal community gardens, urban
farms, abandoned cemeteries, and wastelands. From these acupuncture points,
Paracity will start growing by following the covered irrigation systems such as
the Liukong Channel, and eventually the biourban organism and the static city
will find a balance—the Third Generation Taipei.

Paracity
has a lot of holes, gaps, and nature between houses. This is a city of cracks.
The system ventilates itself like a large-scale beehive of post-industrial
insects. The different temperatures of the roofs, gardens, bodies of water and
shaded platforms will generate small winds between them, and the hot roofs will
start sucking in breeze from the cooler river. The individual houses should
also follow the traditional principles of bioclimatic architecture and not rely
on mechanical air-conditioning.

The
biourbanism of the Paracity is as much landscape as it is architecture. The
all-encompassing landscape-architecture of Paracity includes organic layers for
natural water purification and treatment, community gardening, farming, and
biomass production as an energy source. Infrastructure and irrigation water
originates from the polluted Danshui River and will be both chemically
(bacteria-based) and biologically purified before being used in the farms,
gardens, and the houses of the community. The bacteria/chemically purified
water gets pumped up to the roof parks on the top level of the Paracity, from
where it will by gravity start circulating into the three-dimensional irrigation
systems.

Paracity
is based on free flooding. The whole city stands on stilts, allowing the river
to pulsate freely with the frequent typhoons and storm waters. The Paracity is
actually an organic architectural flood itself, ready to cross the flood wall
of Taipei and spread into the mechanical city.

Paracity
Taipei will be powered mostly by bioenergy that uses the organic waste,
including sludge, taken from the surrounding industrial city and by farming
fast-growing biomass on the flood banks of the Taipei river system. Paracity
Taipei will construct itself through impacts of collective consciousness, and
it is estimated to have 15,000–25,000 inhabitants.

The
wooden primary structure and the environmental technology solutions will remain
pretty much the same no matter in which culture the Paracity starts to grow,
but the real human layer of self-made architecture and farming will follow the
Local Knowledge of the respective culture and site. Paracity is always
site-specific and it is always local. Other Paracities are emerging in North
Fukushima in Japan and the Baluchistan Coast in Pakistan.

CONCLUSION

The
way towards the Third Generation City is a process of becoming a collective
learning and healing organism and of reconnecting the urbanized collective
consciousness with nature. In Taipei, the wall between the city and the river
must go. This requires a total transformation from the city infrastructure and
from the centralized power control. Otherwise, the real development will be
unofficial. Citizens on their behalf are ready and are already breaking the
industrial city apart by themselves. Local knowledge is operating independently
from the official city and is providing punctual third generation surroundings
within the industrial city: urban
acupuncture for the stiff official mechanism.

The
weak signals of the unofficial collective consciousness should be recognized as
the futures’ emerging issues; futures that are already present in Taipei. The
official city should learn how to enjoy acupuncture, how to give up industrial
control in order to let nature step in.

The
Local Knowledge-based transformation layer of Taipei is happening from inside
the city, and it is happening through self-organized punctual interventions.
These interventions are driven by small-scale businesses and alternative
economies benefiting from the fertile land of the Taipei Basin, and of leeching
the material and energy streams of the official city. This acupuncture makes
the city weaker, softer, and readier for a larger change.

The
city is a manifest of human-centered systems—economical, industrial,
philosophical, political, and religious power structures. Biourbanism is an
animist system regulated by nature. Human nature as part of nature, also within
the urban conditions. The era of pollution is the era of industrial urbanism.
The next era has always been within the industrial city. The first generation
city never died. The seeds of the Third Generation City are present.
Architecture is not an art of human control; it is an art of reality. There is
no other reality than nature.